The Magus of the Oakland Hills

On Sunday, we held a brief memorial for Charles Brown at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, the same bookstore that had hosted his 65th birthday party some seven years ago. I was amazed that Liza was able to organize this in the week following Charles's death, with the magazine deadline looming as well and the entire staff still reeling from the shock. But Alan Beatts of Borderlands was enormously helpful in providing an elegant space, as well as staff support for the event itself.

People started arriving a little before noon. Alan had cleared out one of the display shelves toward the front of the room, where we placed the container with his ashes, his straw hat, and a few favorite books. The store's checkout counter became the bar, and several catered food stations helped create the exact ambience we'd been hoping for. (With Charles, there had to be good food.) I never actually counted the size of the crowd, but by the time it grew to what seemed like 40 or 50, we figured it was time to start talking.

Liza thanked everyone for attending, and my job was to introduce the speakers and keep things moving. We'd asked three of Charles's oldest friends, Bob Silverberg, Dick Lupoff, and Connie Willis to begin, since Bob and Dick had known Charles deep in the pre-Locus past, and Connie had been his favored traveling companion and sparring partner for the last few decades. I don't know that I could reproduce what they said, or if I ought to even try, but we all could immediately recognize the younger Charles that emerged from Bob and Dick's comments, and most were in tears by the end of Connie's, which finished by quoting the conclusion of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will be enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.


Things began to get emotional, as we knew they would—though with a fair amount of laughter along the way—and it fell to Liza again, speaking more as a friend than as the new Editor in Chief, to follow Connie's deeply moving tribute. Some more tears, then—but when I asked other Locus staffers if they wanted to add anything, Amelia popped up to read what was perhaps the most Charles-worthy ironic twist of the whole week: an e-mail from Virgin Airways—addressed to Charles--apologizing for the inconvenience caused by the delay in deplaning following the recent flight from Boston, explaining that a passenger had become seriously ill, and hoping his plans worked out well anyway.

That broke the ice a bit, and a few other speakers--Ellen Klages, Rina Weisman, Carol Buchanan-- followed with memories that were often at once outrageous and moving. If there was a recurring theme, it involved a deep generosity and acuity that many of those not as close to Charles never got to see.

After a while we were all ready to get back to mingling with friends and Locus staffers past and present, some of whom hadn't been around in years. Everyone from the current staff in Oakland was there, and Mark Kelly and I were in from out of town. I'm sure I didn't get to chat with everyone, but spent some excellent time with Cecelia Holland, Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn and John Berry, Mark Budz and Marina Fitch, Jacob and Rina Weisman, and of course the Willises and Lupoffs, and Bob and Karen. A few of us adjourned to the Ethiopian restaurant next door afterward, not quite wanting to let the afternoon slip away.

There'll be another, more public memorial in Montreal in a couple of weeks. It's scheduled for Sunday afternoon at 2pm, August 9, and is in the Worldcon schedule posted on the web.

Catch-ups

1. Further to my original post, some further tributes to Charles Brown can be found around the web. A couple that particularly caught my eye: John Crowley, Neil Gaiman, Cheryl Morgan, as well as Locus's own Mark Kelly and Jonathan Strahan (1, 2, 3).
2. As Liza said a while ago, comments on this blog are moderated, but we're all conscious of the need for the conversation to be as close to in-real-time as possible. So I'm now a comment moderator, in addition to the folk at Locus HQ. Given that we're in very different time zones, this should mean that comments get approved quickly wherever you are.
3. Emphatically not a review, since I haven't finished reading it, but: so far, Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes is absolutely stunning. It's her second book (the first being Moonwise (1991), recently reissued by Wildside). Cloud and Ashes comprises two previously published stories, "Jack Daw's Paw" (2000), and "A Crowd of Bone" (2003) plus a new novel-length piece, "Unleaving". I keep wanting to engage in slack reviewerly hyperbole and say "no-one writes like Greer Gilman" or something. At the very least, I can't think of any other writer in the fantastic who has such an interesting and full relationship with the roots of the language she uses: every word has its bones exposed. Her work is dense (and so, I guess, "difficult", meaning that it requires the reader to do some work), but rewarding in proportion to the effort you put in. See also Faren's review here.
   
4. I and many other Locus people will be at the Worldcon in Montreal in early August. We'll be on various panels (English program available here, French here) and, no doubt, hanging out in the bar(s). So, y'know, do say hello. (While renewing your subscription to the magazine, of course...)

Charles N. Brown

I guess that most people by now will have seen the news that Charles N. Brown, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Locus, died yesterday on the way back to California from Readercon in Boston. I know that Liza and the team at Locus HQ are working on tributes to him for the August edition of the magazine, but I just wanted to put my own thoughts down here now, and offer anyone else who wants the opportunity to do the same the chance to use the comments.

As a relative newcomer to the Locus family (it's not an overstated way to describe it), I first got to know Charles in 2005. He came up to me at the post-Hugo party at the Glasgow Worldcon that year and allowed, in that hangdog way he had, as how some people had been saying nice things about my work: did I want to review a particular book for Locus? It wasn't an easy assignment: the book was by a friend, it required a lot of background reading first, and I didn't have many words to work in, but it was a fun challenge. Without saying anything directly, he made clear that he'd chosen the book very deliberately with that in mind. Then, at ICFA the following Spring, he came up to me with the idea of retrospective columns on authors of classic sf: would I be interested? I asked if there were any constraints - word-length, who I could cover, and so on. He seemed remarkably unconcerned about all that: he'd picked me to give a different generation's perspective on the classics and was happy to let me get on with it. (He seemed to have the illusion that I was a young person, which I did nothing to disabuse him of.) And from that point on, I was in the family: allowed scope in my column to talk about pretty much whoever I wanted; edited lightly and with care; hauled off to good restaurants whenever I was in the right place at the right time. I knew perfectly well he disagreed with, for instance, my opinions on Heinlein or van Vogt, but the most I ever got was a gentle push that I might want to look at work X which, he said, would answer some of my objections. He was usually right.

And then, in February of last year, I got to stay at Locus HQ in the Oakland hills for a couple of days; Gary Wolfe was in town as well, and we all sat around talking as sf folk do. My original plan, to see if I could persuade Charles to arrange a trip to the legendary French Laundry restaurant, didn't work out, but along with Amelia Beamer we discovered plenty of good places to eat in Berkeley. I got to peruse the extraordinary Locus library, on rolling shelves in a room carved back into the hill. Charles allowed me to ransack his collection of Mahler CDs, tolerating my loudly expressed views on Abbado or Haitink with benign paternal amusement. Charles always said that he liked Mahler for the same reasons he liked sf: that it was in the end teleological, that it said something about where humanity was ultimately going. I said that I liked Mahler for the tunes, the orchestration and the occasional vulgar blazes of sound. Explosions and spaceships aren't everything, he said.

We disagreed about a lot, most recently at Readercon just this last weekend: on a panel on novels of the year, he handed out a list of books he'd liked, and I picked entirely different ones. But he took my disagreement in good spirit, and said afterwards that I'd genuinely persuaded him on the merits of one book he'd initially disliked. The next day, when we sat down with John Clute and Gary Wolfe to do a taped discussion on van Vogt's science fiction, he was wonderfully evocative about the effect van Vogt had had on him as a teenager, and how happy he was that books like Slan were still in print and selling. Continuity of that kind mattered a lot to him.

All this, I'm sure, proves the old saw that eulogies tend to reveal more about the person delivering them than the person they're supposed to be about. But there are a couple of Charles-esque traits that I think plenty of others will recognise from the descriptions above: his deep and wide knowledge of sf, his tendency (especially unusual in this field) to be a canny listener as much as a talker, his frequent unsolicted acts of kindness, his love of food and wine.

As the story I linked to at the start says, Charles had laid plans carefully so that Locus will continue after his death, and that's what we all intend to do. (Those of you who know Liza Groen Trombi and the rest of the team will realise that Charles has assembled an incredibly able group to do this.) At some point, I think we'll all be able to step back and get a sense of what an achievement it was that he established and oversaw for over 40 years a magazine of this kind. As Patrick Nielsen Hayden just said, "There’s a very real sense in which the modern science fiction world, professional and fan, can be defined as 'the set of people who know what Locus is and care about it.'" It's probably not for someone who writes for Locus to say what its importance is (and Patrick gives a perfectly fair qualifier in his next sentence), so I just want to finish by fixing on one word that a lot of the notes I've seen about Charles have used: mentor. I've gone on at such length about my own encounters with Charles because I suspect many other people will have similar stories to tell, and they'll have found, as I did, that he was quietly - or occasionally not-quietly - teaching them things about the field he loved. So Locus is only one of the legacies he leaves behind.

Finding Fritz - Editing The Best of Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber Jr, who was born just before Christmas in the winter of 1910 and died nearly 82 years later in the fall of 1992, was simply one of the finest science fiction and fantasy writers to ever have lived. His body of work is vast and impressive. He effectively birthed the urban fantasy with his story "Smoke Ghost" and wrote one of its enduring works in Our Lady of Darkness. He created major works of science fiction like his Change War sequence of stories and novella "The Big Time". However his greatest creation - the one that will most likely never go out of print - was the sequence of stories set in Lankhmar and featuring that unlikely pair of heroes, the giant Fafhrd and his diminutive friend the Grey Mouser. The seven volumes of their adventures are one of the towering achievements of fantasy, and one of the touchstone works of swords and sorcery (a term Leiber coined).

While Leiber is widely acknowledged within the science fiction and fantasy field, a large amount of his work is out of print or difficult to find, despite the best efforts of a number of publishers. This came up over drinks one afternoon in the late summer of 2008, when Locus publisher Charles Brown, Night Shade Press proprietor Jeremy Lassen and I were partaking of drinks and enjoying the sunshine on the Locus Back Deck. We shared our enthusiasms for Leiber's great works, Charles reminisced about Leiber and his visits to Locus HQ, and we hatched between us the notion that Night Shade should publish a short-ish collection of Mr Leiber's best stories.

There was much enthusiasm for the idea, which carried through that summery weekend into dinner with Leiber's agent, Richard Curtis. Before we knew it - almost literally before we realised it - it was agreed. Charles and I would select 125,000 words of Leiber's best stories. We'd find a suitable introducer for the volume and it would be published by Night Shade in 2010, with the intention that making those stories available in a classy, stylish, but affordable volume might increase the profile of his work and hopefully introduce it to a wider audience.

And, over the past few months Charles and I have worked to make that a reality. An introducer has been arranged and the writer of a posssible afterword discussed. We've also carefully been working up a shortlist of stories that could go into our volume (tentatively titled 'The Best of Fritz Leiber'). As you can imagine we're eager to make sure the book is the best possible introduction to Leiber, containing his best and his most famous stories, the kind of book you could hand to someone who had no exposure to his work that would explain to them exactly what he was on about, that would be the best possible chance of hooking them so they might go looking for more.

As we discussed our list the idea arose that we might open a discussion here on the Locus blog with interested readers, giving the broader Locus community a chance to suggest stories, to argue recommendations, and to generally voice an opinion on what might or might not work. Charles and I are both extremely opinionated, and are more than capable of making such decisions, but it seemed to us both that the discussion was one that was worth having.

So, we're posting the longer version of our short list for the book here. This comprises more than the number of stories we can include in the book, so is not the official table of contents. It's merely the list from which we'll most likely compile the ToC (unless we're persuaded otherwise). We invite you to look the list over, give it some thought, and then jump onto the comments and let us know what you think. Is the core of a great book here? Have we missed an obvious selection? Have we got it horribly wrong, or just exactly right? Let us know what you think.

1. A Deskful of Girls (1958)
2. A Pail of Air (1951)
3. Adept's Gambit (1947)
4. America the Beautiful (1970)
5. Bazaar of the Bizarre (1963)
6. Belsen Express (1975)
7. Catch That Zeppelin! (1975)
8. Coming Attraction (1950)
9. Four Ghosts in Hamlet (1965)
10. Gonna Roll the Bones (1967)
11. Ill Met in Lankhmar (1970)
12. Midnight by the Morphy Watch (1974)
13. Poor Superman (1951)
14. Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee (1958)
15. Sea Magic (1977)
16. Smoke Ghost (1941)
17. Space Time for Springers (1958)
18. The Button Molder (1979)
19. The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars (1983)
20. The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949)
21. The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity (1962)
22. The Man Who Never Grew Young (1949)
23. The Night he Cried (1953)
24. The Winter Flies (1967)
25. Two Sought Adventure (1939)

Note: These stories are listed in alphabetical order by title, and not in proposed running order.